the poetrysheet
whimsy, subversion, bowling
Number 489, April 20,
2004
Kurd Adler (1892-1916)
“The pineries are gone, the old-growth pines transmuted into
houses and barns, many still standing. The loggers have moved on to other
forests. The Mississippi remains.”
—Gayle Rein, “A river of logs,” in Grand Excursion on the Upper
Mississippi: Places, Landscapes, and Regional Identity after 1854, edited by Curtis and
Elizabeth Roseman
Larry was up with the dawn. We talked for a long time
over coffee on the wood platform that made a small porch for his trailer. He
pulled out maps, an atlas and several others, with reverence.
“I'm from Nebraska,” he said. “A town just south of
Lincoln." He traced his index finger over the map. "It sounds to me
you went along this road." He talked of towns along the path: Beatrice,
Friend, North Platte, Kimball. I told of the people I had met there. After
Nebraska, Larry pulled out a gazetteer of Wyoming, and then topographical maps
of Yellowstone.
"I can look at maps for hours," he said.
"The town names, the roads, the colors. All of them mean something,
something important. And maps are good long after the roads have changed. They
tell us where we've been, how far we can go, and what still needs to be
seen."
Three hours later, we stood from the atlas and
stretched our legs. Larry took me up to the closest phone, which was at the
neighboring ranch twelve-miles up the dirt track. The rancher was a spindly,
hard-bitten man in greasy, dusty jeans and billed cap who didn’t say much. He
smiled and pointed to his machine shed when I asked to use the phone. The shed
was a jumble of farm implements, lathes, grinders, every sort of small engine
(and a few large ones). But nowhere was the dust of disuse. The rancher had a
crew, and they used nearly everything in the shed at different times of the
year to tend his huge spread.
The phone was an old wall, dial model, yellow somewhere
under the years of grease. The place was so remote an operator had to place the
call. The length of time away from home and of the trip still to go felt heavy.
My girlfriend answered after a lot of wrangling with several operators who
didn’t quite understand why I was using a phone that wasn’t on the grid. When I
heard her voice, homesickness welled up in huge sobs from deep inside. I cried
big, fat tears that fell in spatters on the concrete floor.
Then I thought of myself, standing there in rough-and-tough
man country, in the middle of the Montana plains, above a remote stretch of
river, crying—in a ranch repair barn, surrounded by worn tools and parts,
augers and fence post drivers, spilled grease and rusty machinery. I laughed
until I cried again. I cleared up after a while.
“You probably think I’m a manic,” I said.
“No,” she said. “You’ll be home in a while, then
something new and different begins. It’s just hard to see right now.”
Larry waited patiently outside in the truck, watching
the wind whip the sagebrush. He was quiet as we bumped back toward the
campground over the dirt track.
“Tough, isn’t it?” he said after a time.
“Yeah, I kind of lost it back there.”
“First time in a long while, wasn’t it?”
“The first time since Topeka, Kansas. I talked to my
kid there on a pay phone. My feet hurt. She was eating ice cream.”
“This time felt better, didn’t it?” he said.
A tension somewhere inside had been released, like a
spring popped. Larry drove with one hand draped over the steering wheel. He
knew what it was to be alone.
Two poems by Bill Bauer
Mountain
Daughter, this is story many times told.
You can't palm the mountain peak
as the flea on your knuckle can't fathom
how vast the human hand.
The two of you can only
sit at the bottom
of those inexplicable sites
and meditate.
A special place
When she lifts her arms
what was then shaven
turns to brush,
crispy as whiskers
on a man’s face.
Her dark valleys
smell of spice and earth.
Her scent makes a man
hard and plump.
He doesn’t know where
to begin, where to end.
That’s how a woman
keeps a man
cooking new and different
pastas for her,
until God only knows when or how
he can make satisfying what
he has begun to stir.
Bill
Bauer will read his poems as part of the Writers Place Readers Series tonight
at 7 p.m. at the Johnson County Resource Library, 9875
W. 87th Street, Overland Park, KS
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SHIRTS
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SWAG
WHERE THE LEFT IS ALWAYS RIGHTEOUS